Clarification about how client failback works in DFS Namespaces

A blog reader recently contacted us with the following question, “When I was testing DFS failback, the client reconnected to the local site server but the files were still being served at the failover server. Why aren’t the files served from the local server after the client fails back?”

Sanjoy Chatterjee responds: “If a client has open files on the failover server, and Offline Files is not being used, DFS does not redirect the handles to the new referrals, and the client will continue to get files from the failover server. Also, clients refresh their referral caches when the TTL expires. So, if the TTL has not expired, the client will continue to go to the same site and not fail back to the local site.”